By the mid sixteenth century, what everyone needed was a flat map allowing seaborne navigators to plot long distances using a straight line that took into account the curvature of the earth’s surface. The result was Gerard Mercator’s enormous 1569 world map, called a ‘Description of the Earth for Use in Navigation’. It used a famous projection that lengthened the parallels north and south of the equator. As can be seen on this map, such a method created maximum distortion at the Polar regions, but was remarkably accurate either side of the equatorial regions, particularly when sailing east or west (as shown by the tiny ships in the Indian and Pacific oceans). By the eighteenth century the projection had been adopted almost universally by European navigators, and was adapted by nineteenth-century atlases extolling the virtues of the British Empire. This led to Mercator being accused of ‘Eurocentrism’, an unfair criticism of the map and the man, considering Europe is not at its center, and that Mercator had his own problems with authority, standing accused of heresy by the Catholic authorities in 1544.
A History of the World in Twelve Maps
From Ptolemy to Google Earth, the world has been mapped by visionaries
Gerard Mercator, World Map, 1569
Full List
Maps of the World
- Claudius Ptolemy, World Map, 150 AD
- Al-Sharif al-Idrisi, World Map, 1154
- Richard of Haldingham, Mappa-mundi, 1300
- The Yu Ji Tu, 1137
- Martin Waldseemüller’s Universal Cosmography, 1507
- Diogo Ribeiro, World Map, 1529
- Gerard Mercator, World Map, 1569
- Joan Blaeu, Atlas Maior, 1662
- Louis Capitaine, Map of France, 1790
- Sir Halford Mackinder, The Natural Seats of Power, 1904
- Arno Peters, World Map, 1973
- Homepage of Google Earth, 2013